Peter Rainer

A nutty, awkward, oddly impassioned parable that mashes together so many different genres that calling it “unclassifiable” doesn’t really explain very much.

Dislikable movie characters don't always result in dislikable movies but that's certainly the case with Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day, a dysfunctional family meltdown movie about an impending wedding that only grows more aggravating as it unwinds.

The film works best as a straightforward melodrama set in an anything but straightforward world.

Once you accept the fact that “Rogue Nation” is not going to be the wingding of the franchise, it becomes a lot easier to enjoy.

What the film is ultimately about is the extent to which love and caring can help turn a life around for a person deemed beyond reach.

The film is laced with lovely moments, from the leads and from Shelly as a waitress friend.

This may seem like a stunt, but the experience, with many of the sitters tearing up, or smiling beatifically, is overwhelming to watch.

A winning movie about losing. I didn’t always warm to its coy quirkiness, but it’s the rare American movie about contemporary teenagers that rings more true than false.

Barring a middle-class revolt, it's extremely unlikely that, whatever its virtues, universal healthcare could ever take hold in America. Still, I'm glad Moore made his film.

Theron breaks through with a ferocious performance--a real career-changer.

The film stands quite well on its own. The directors have made the right, essential decision to make the movie almost entirely from Maisie’s point of view.

It’s always gratifying to see a movie in which an ostensibly closed-off community is depicted humanely rather than voyeuristically.

Too much of Wild is broken up by flashbacks that tend to dissipate rather than enhance Strayed’s trek. At times she is swallowed up almost to the point of vanishing by the immensity of the vistas.

All in all, a harrowing, one-of-a-kind movie.

Director Hank Rogerson casts a sympathetic eye on the proceedings.

I wish the entirety of Polisse were as good as its parts, but perhaps its free-form, mood-swing approach was unavoidable, given the subject. The audience is put through the same wringer as the cops.

This computer-animated feature is consistently inventive, if a bit busy and overlong.

As well-meaning and "sensitive" as Awakenings is, it never rises much above the level of a grade-A tear-jerker. It achieves most of its effects by tenderizing raw material into something marshmallowy. [20 Dec 1990, p.1]

Arkin has a great and gentle feeling for small-time malcontents, and he knows how to make their woes our own. He does justice to the human comedy -- and redeems the movie.

By holding the shot, as she so often does in this film, Takesue is encouraging audiences to take a deep, long look at things they might otherwise miss.

The Mexican writer-director Fernando Eimbcke attempts to give this story a melancholy overlay, but its main interest is in its confirmation that teenagers are pretty much the same everywhere.

For movie buffs, the only real fun to be had at Inception could be toting up the lifts from other movies, including Cocteau’s “Blood of a Poet” and “The Matrix” series and just about anything by Kubrick.

Whitaker is terrifying in a way that we recognize not from old movies but from life.

At its most basic level, Cast Away is a graceful and powerfully rendered survivalist saga.... And yet there's something generic about Chuck's plight. The filmmakers don't opt for the usual happy-face Hollywood ending, but even the half-smile they provide smacks of inspirationalism.

Once summer ends and the kids enroll in school, the jig will be up. The film ends with that eventuality. It would have been richer if it had opened with it.

Delivers more goose bumps than anything Hollywood has served up in years – which I hope does not mean that Bayona, a first-time feature director and music video whiz, will be enlisted to direct "Saw V."

From a purely pictorial standpoint, this new Dune is indeed often overwhelming. The sheer monumentality of it all is impressive. Alas, the film’s emotional power underwhelms.

Chemla has an expressive face and she’s photographed lovingly, in a way that would probably have caught the attentions of the great French Impressionists, but ultimately she is more of a sculptural presence than a fully fleshed-out protagonist.

The first full-scale documentary about the history of those years, and it lays out lucidly the involvement of the Communist Party in the young men's defense and the ways in which the trials, against the backdrop of the Depression, replayed the murderous quarrels of the Civil War all over again.

Red Lights is the most ambiguously compelling romance around.

The movie, in a very real sense, is about the privilege, the sexiness, of being a movie star. Certainly it isn't about the heist; never was.

Rush isn’t bad, exactly, but it’s like a standard-issue male action programmer that somehow crept in from an earlier era.

Mongol is a throwback to a more respectable tradition. The largeness of its scope arises naturally from the material, not the budget. The movie earns its stature.

I wanted to be transported by this movie; I wasn't quite. But I respect it.

If Armageddon Time simply recounted Paul’s coming-of-age, complete with a hefty serving of family spats, it wouldn’t have the resonance it often exhibits at its best. The friendship between Paul and Johnny, even more than Paul’s relationship with his grandfather, is the film’s emotional core.

As a piece of filmmaking, Munich is rarely less than gripping. As a political essay, as a brief against despair, it is far less convincing.

The story that Hidden Figures tells is so irresistible that you can almost forgive the fact that the movie itself is resistibly unoriginal. It’s an unabashed crowd-pleaser with a heavy history lesson undertow.

Anonyma stands out in A Woman in Berlin not only because of her ragged nobility but also because, alas, Färberböck has surrounded her with a gaggle of Berliners who seem right out of Central Casting.

One of the few open-minded Hollywood movies about Christian fundamentalism, but the mind isn't sufficiently exploratory.

Draggy Italian epic that's big on production values but skimpy on inspiration.

The Town might have amounted to something more than an occasionally good movie about crooks in trouble. There's a knife-edge here, but it's been blunted.

Thematically at least, it’s like a John Ford movie with pickup trucks. But everything plays out with a sodden deliberateness, as if something mythic were going on. No such luck.

The reason we feel so close to Socha, a man who at first seems nothing more than a racist scoundrel, is that his moral odyssey, with its advances and retreats, is so emotionally believable.

There's an original comic temperament at work here, and that's rare.

Has some rapturously observant sequences concerning childhood.

A pretty good example of the kind of movie Hollywood used to turn out by the yard.

The film’s thesis is that the struggle to survive did not end with the camps. Each of the women profiled recounts, with varying degrees of intensity, the difficulties in creating a “normal” life in a world where the concept of “home” can no longer fully resonate.

There are many kinds of heroism, of course, but the version on display in Sully is, well, unsullied, and that sort of thing is more suitable for a monument than a movie.

It gives ample play to all sides of the argument. Herzog allows us to think things through on our own.

Nolan tries to pair the cosmic esoterica with this father-daughter tussle, but the mix doesn't jell. Visionary movies require a bigger vision.

As this film demonstrates in so many ways, the intractability of the Arab-Israeli political situation is, to put it mildly, not easily resolved, least of all onscreen.

If Nine Queens were a great film, instead of just a very good one, this rottenness would be so pervasive that it would burst the bounds of the plot; it would make us shudder.

The performances are amazing.

Wiseman lets the material breathe in a manner unique to the subject.

It’s a gangster movie that tries to be more than that, not always successfully. In his own small-scale way, Chandor wants to expand the reach of his vision to “Godfather” status, with Abel as his shining (tainted) knight.

It does leave you with something, though – a deeply wistful mood, if not a full experience. It bears out the sadness in a line from Tao earlier in the film: “Nobody can be with you all through life.”

The role of Deb is not written with any great depth, but Miller gets into the character’s psychological complications in a way that almost compensates for the lack.

The animation is consistently sporty and there are some choice comic riffs on martial arts movies.

The Duke is a genial British entertainment that, at its best, reminded me a bit of those wonderful postwar Ealing Studio films like “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Ladykillers.”

If the literacy of The History Boys is deemed uncinematic, then give me uncinema anytime.

Stunning.

The sunniness of Fastball leaves out a lot, but watching it can be as pleasurable as an afternoon at the ballpark.

Invictus has an understated grace, but too often it comes across as hero-worshipy.

It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy posing as hard-edged realism.

I suppose the relationship is Oedipal or primal or something or other, but mostly it’s just an excuse for Dolan to stage a series of gaudy shout-fests.

Amir Bar-Lev's documentary is fascinating on all kinds of levels: as a movie about the nature of art, the lure and pitfalls of celebrity, and the complicated conundrums of parenting.

Not always believable, but the film has a moody expressiveness that stays with you.

A feast for Neil Young lovers and initiates alike.

The film, directed by Maria Schrader and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, doesn’t add much to the existing record. What it does do, when it’s good, is something the news headlines could not: It dramatizes the survivors’ voices on camera.

In Source Code, the new thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal, "Groundhog Day" goes metaphysical. Some people, I know, will argue that "Groundhog Day" was already metaphysical. Perhaps, but compared with "Source Code," it's "Caddyshack."

The sometimes agonizingly powerful documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat is built around some staggering statistics: Only two journalists were killed in World War I. Sixty-three lost their lives in World War II. And in the past two decades, almost one journalist per week has been killed.

Interviewed in the film, Juárez journalist Sandra Rodriguez offers up this grim summation: “That these people represent the ideal of success, impunity, and limitless power is symptomatic of how defeated we are as a society.”

Without Cooper's performance, Breach would have been a good, workmanlike thriller. His presence lifts it to a whole new level.

Tsunashima gives a deft performance in a role that starts out as caricature but becomes full-bodied. Collette commands the screen virtually the entire time.

A first-rate zombie movie. The best tribute I can offer is that it makes you want to go out directly afterward and down some expensive single-malt scotch.

There are some touching interactions between the players, but the film’s humanism is too predictably calibrated.

It’s a good bet that the director had “High Noon” in mind when he made this film, but the comparison ends there. As a compact study of wartime guilt, the film has the look and feel of a waking nightmare.

Penn has a real feeling for the stray moments in life that suddenly rush up and overwhelm us with emotion. He also has an eye for beauty in the wilds, of which this film has many. And he's very good with actors. What he lacks is a sharper eye for the wooziness of romanticism, and that wooziness, despite some truly breathtaking moments, infuses Into the Wild.

What is strikingly brought home in “Rumble” is how the vast stew of influences in American music, rather than diluting everything, makes the music all the more powerful.

A brisk, black-and-white, worst-possible-case dinner party scenario overflowing with good actors and bad vibes.

Probably the most faithful to the writer's tortured spirit. It's the kind of movie that gets under your skin - and stays there.

Rust and Bone is made by filmmakers and actors who are capable of much more – and they know it. The result is a true oddity: an orgy of hokum dressed up as an art film.

Lanthimos doesn’t have the directorial energy to stir this thick allegorical stew. Lacking any of the conventional action-thriller movie skills, his deadpan style may be the only one available to him.

Over time, though, with films such as "Lost Highway" and, to a lesser extent, "Mulholland Drive," Lynch's movies became less personal and more private. Whatever he is working out in his new film, Inland Empire, it's beyond the reach of all but his idolators.

The sources of this happiness become far more complex when Adrien’s revelation is imparted (only to Anna). At this point the movie’s moral compass spins.

At times the film resembles a promo for Shortz and the Times, and the celebrity puzzlers, who include filmmaker Ken Burns, Bill Clinton, and the Indigo Girls, have an unfortunate tendency to bloviate. Not so Jon Stewart, who seems to regard each Times puzzle as an opportunity to go mano a mano with Shortz.

Despite the film’s emphasis on Ryota’s transformation, the most piercing moment for me came in the scene in which his wife anguishes over her guilt in not realizing right away, as a mother, that Keita was not her birth son.

Caine is reason enough to see any movie. He gives this clever, somewhat lumbering caper movie a deep-seated soul.

Well, it is shameless, and it tugs the heart in all the obvious places, but it has a winning vivaciousness and a trio of performances by its lead actors that transcend its “inspirational” niche.

The Iron Lady is too bland to be controversial, too antiquated to speak to the present.

Is there enough reason for Gary Sinise to have remade Of Mice and Men? You can respond to Steinbeck’s qualities of feeling in the movie, but Sinise, who directed as well as stars as the itinerant ranch hand George opposite John Malkovich’s hulking, feeble-minded Lennie, doesn’t really make the material his own. It’s a “distinguished” piece of filmmaking in that somewhat lifeless, classical tradition where all the actors seem a bit too posed to be believable and all the colors seem too bright and varnished.

For a movie so sensuously mounted, it's remarkably grounded.

The veteran rock musician Nick Cave wrote the screenplay and John Hillcoat directed, both somewhat in thrall to Sam Peckinpah. The bonds of family are the centerpiece of this highly uneven, hyperviolent film.

A bit too awed by its depiction of the healing power of love. It's minor indeed compared with "In the Bedroom," which deals with a similar subject and doesn't back away from the rawness of grief.

The Coens have a true feeling for the sleek surfaces of the genre, but they don't connect with its sordid, sexy undercurrent; that's why Crane is made to seem so passive.

The “what if?” aspects of this true-life drama are so tantalizing that the movie’s workmanlike execution is doubly dissatisfying.

Hoffman, bloated and flushed, does not look well in this film. But he is such a consummate actor that whatever infirmities he may have been fighting become a part of his performance. His portrayal, complete with a convincing German accent, is a fully rounded portrait of courage and dissolution.

What rescues the movie from being mere flimsy fun is Rutherford’s performance. She gives Agathe’s waywardness a gravity, a hint of darkness.

It's a strange, one-of-a-kind film that was to be Benacarraf's only full-length feature.

The film is gracefully directed around the edges, but the core story, a kind of existential murder mystery, is swallowed up by a series of increasingly outlandish plot devices involving drug runners and Tarantino-esque shootouts.

The film wants to be a wing-ding entertainment, but it also strives to say Something Important. The first half of that equation is what makes the movie eminently worth watching.

Despite all the computer-generated effects and highflying superhero theatrics, this roughly $120 million movie is, with few exceptions, remarkable only in its small human touches.

The saving grace of Queen and Country is that its nostalgia is not laced with sentimentality. Even working in this conventional mode, Boorman doesn’t try to strong-arm us into blubberiness.

Audiences for this film should have no such qualms: When the camel lolls his jaws at dinnertime, or sways his Bactrian bulk, you may decide you've never seen anything quite so hilarious -- or magnificent.

Spurlock's movie is an attack on our eating habits, but it's also a prime example of an all-American sport--making a spectacle of oneself for fun and profit. Spurlock, you'll be surprised to learn, is developing a TV spinoff, with himself as host.

Evocative and disturbing.

The relationship between Gilbert and Arnie has "Of Mice and Men" vibes, but it strikes a responsive chord in a way that the rest of the film doesn't. Most of the credit for that goes to DiCaprio's performance.

Cold Mountain has some marvelous, intimate moments and a real feeling, at times, for the loss that war engenders, but it also has more than its share of hokum--which would be more entertaining if the hokum were juicier.

One of the sweetest and most heartfelt movies ever made about a life in the theater.

Blitz captures high school atmosphere well – not an easy thing to do – but overall the movie coasts on quirkiness.

Clint Eastwood’s second film this year, American Sniper, about the late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, is considerably better than his first, “The Jersey Boys.” As a piece of direction, it’s as taut as anything he’s ever done.

The viciously anti-Semitic 1940 German movie “Jew Süss” is one of the most notorious films ever made...Today it is one of the few Nazi-era films that still cannot legally be shown.

It's a fascinating story, fascinatingly told.

My favorite character is not Nik but his 15-year-old sister, Rudina (Sindi Lacej), who takes over her father's bread delivery route in his rickety wagon and makes a go of it against all odds. Her pluck seems both Old World and New World.

By the end of the movie, the characters are numbed, while the audience is sensitized to the mayhem to an almost unbearable degree.

At times, “Homecoming” resembles a very good after-school special embedded in a cacophonous franchise flick. That’s probably not the demographic the filmmakers were most hoping to please.

Tony Leung plays Ip Man, the real-life kung fu innovator who most famously trained Bruce Lee. His life takes in the upheavals in China from the 1930s through the ’50s, including the Japanese occupation.

Fortunately, there are more than enough moments when the heavy-handedness gives way to the sheer bliss of ordinary magic.

This is Eastwood's first acting job since "Million Dollar Baby," and his range, like his raspiness, is fairly one-note.

By relying too much on snappy dialogue and by adhering to the philosophy that "steel should feel like steel and glass should feel like glass," the filmmakers have bridled their imaginations and created a movie about toys that are too blubbery and not rubbery enough.

Complicated thriller that gets more interesting as its complications pile up.

Almodóvar is attempting to create a continuum of genres as well, one that particularly involves the traditional Hollywood “women’s picture” and film noir. That he doesn’t altogether succeed is perhaps due to the fact that Almodóvar is too enraptured by old movie conventions to give them a new life.

Nobody can play stupid better than Daniels – think "Dumb and Dumber" – and, as it turns out, few can play smarter. He's a sharp asset in a sharp movie.

Each man is sharply characterized, and the performances are expert, right down to the cook (Toby Jones).

Best not when it is preaching to us but, rather, in those moments when both King and Riggs drop their public faces and reveal the roiling underneath.

A very good thrill ride and Cruise is better than he's been in a long time.

It's plotless. It fits no category -- "docudrama tone poem" probably comes closest.

Leconte films in an austere yet invigorated style; the action never settles into stiff tableaux.

We are treated to all manner of worshipy recollections from a stable of Thompson's admirers, including, believe it or not, Patrick Buchanan and James Baker. Who said gonzo politics doesn't make for strange bedfellows?

Black, who wrote "Lethal Weapon," makes his directorial debut, and he puts a fresh spin not only on that film but also on a whole slew of films noirs.

Its stars, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, are on screen virtually all of the time, and they're always worth watching. But the film puts such a premium on tastefulness that it never threatens to become exciting. [23 Nov 1990]

A blob of good intentions. Good intentions do not a good movie make. 

The idealization of the native American existence in The New World, precolonization, is a pleasing fantasy but also timeworn and ahistorical. Surely someone as sophisticated as Malick - who once taught philosophy at MIT and was a Rhodes scholar - understands that he is putting forth a fabrication.

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge (who is a physician!) keep the action spurting forward, but their approach is oblique. We seem to be catching the odds and ends of scenes; it's as if the filmmakers wanted to make a movie in which all the expected high points were skimped.

Writer-director Billy Ray is so eager to be fair-minded about everything and everyone that you can't help thinking he's a patsy, too. If he directed a movie of Othello, he'd probably try to make us feel warm and fuzzy about poor, misunderstood Iago.

Following the shows from rehearsals to Tony Awards night, she gets behind the scenes and does a good job conveying the incessant anxieties and glee of the talents involved.

What the film is saying, so far as I can tell, is that, if cut, you will bleed. And bleed. As the vampire's kindred Seven Deadly Sinner, wild-haired Kim Ok-vin looks like she's having a high old time.

John Herzfeld, the writer-director, attacks America's lust for voyeuristic sensationalism by aping the very tactics he decries.

Amalric throws in flashbacks and flash-forwards between bedroom and courthouse (yes, there’s a murder), and I was reminded again why I prefer my noirs in the hardboiled American style rather than tricked up with all this faux Alain Resnais-style filigree.

French Kiss tries to be a glass of pink champagne, but some of the fizz has gone out of the bottle. But director Lawrence Kasdan and screenwriter Adam Brooks cram so many potshots into the piece that, after a while, it makes you laugh anyway.

It’s a truism that actors love playing scoundrels much more than goody-goodies – though Thompson excels at both. Here she goes full out into villainy mode, and she’s a hoot.

In the scenes between Hanks and Newman, we get glimpses of greatness.

In the end, the film’s most nuanced summation comes from Wajdi, who says, “No one has a monopoly on suffering.”

Many of the interviews in the film – conducted with everyone from family members to Christopher Hitchens and Tom Hayden – look to be 10, even 20, years old. Together they concoct a complex portrait of an ultimately unknowable man.

Soppy, schematic weepie.

Watching this film is a little bit like getting mauled and tickled at the same time. The filmmakers have given the whole shebang a hefty levity, and that's not easy to accomplish in a full-scale disaster movie.

It’s the ultimate time-travel movie into the future, a “flowing time sculpture,” in Linklater’s own words.

At 88, Christopher is at the top of his game. He turns Getty into a dastardly miser with an aggrieved core. There hasn’t been such a lonely mogul in the movies since Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane expired with “Rosebud” on his lips.

I kept wishing that Still Mine had jettisoned the film’s true-story trappings and moved more deeply into the Craig-Irene duet unencumbered by bad-news bulletins from the building inspectors. Easily the best parts of the film are those in which husband and wife quietly summon up in often the barest of glances and touches a near-lifetime together.

Nasheed is no saint, and if he had remained in office, maybe, as with so many others, he would have capitulated to politics as usual. But his temper, if not his outcome, is inspiring.

We get to see film of daughter Tricia’s wedding (her father is a surprisingly agile ballroom dancer) and other oddities. We also hear more of the famous audiotapes than usual. You’ll be interested to know that Nixon, not in praise, referred to Henry Kissinger as a “swinger.”

What makes Miami Blues unsettling, in spite of itself, is the sense that the garish ultra-violence we're witnessing is just a species of high jinks. Armitage, adapting Charles Willeford's smart, nasty 1984 novel, doesn't provide the kind of moral dimension that might make Junior's sprees cumulatively frightening. The film careens along as a blithely funky shoot-'em-up. It might have been made by a sociopathic Chuck Jones.

It's an inescapable fact that Gould's singular musical insights – the way he brought out in Bach a mesmeric unity of sound – could only have arisen from a singular personality.

The foundation of this sympathy is Hoover's complicated sexuality. Eastwood and Black have attempted to provide Hoover with the balm he denied himself in his own lifetime. It doesn't work.

Despite much of the turmoil depicted, there is a sweetness to parts of this film that is reminiscent of the 1961 British movie "A Taste of Honey."

A marvelous literary thriller that gets at the way books can stay with people forever.

The empathy never lifts off -- never becomes poetry. It doesn't help that Leigh indulges his unfortunate habit of larding the soundtrack with draggy, mournful music, heavy on the cello.

It would have been wonderful if Lee had consented to an interview for this documentary, but at least we have, among many others, her 99-year-old sister Alice, until recently a practicing lawyer in their hometown of Monroeville, Ala.

Pretty much the whole movie is a series of poses, static and uninvolving, except for cinematographer Eduardo Serra’s lighting, which makes everything look convincingly Vermeer-ish. I’d like to see what he could do with Rembrandt.

The reason The Wedding Plan rises above its flippancies is not only because of the novelty of its Israeli trappings but also because Michal is such an ingratiating whirlwind.

Sisters on Track starts out as a flashy success story about headline-making kids but turns into something much more meaningful: a tribute to the value of being strong in spirit.

Since we all know that Paris wasn’t blown to smithereens, the tension here is not in the outcome but in how it was achieved. The meeting between these two men is largely fictional, but the stakes could not have been more real.

In the House does at least engage us. It even enlists us implicitly as co-conspirators in Claude’s devious storytelling.

The accounting of his life story, as it unfolds in the film, is grounded in the brutal realities of corporate skulduggery. I’m a big fan of Balzac’s maxim that “behind every great fortune is a great crime,” and if nothing in Jobs’s history qualifies as a great crime, there is certainly a long trail of extreme misdeeds.

Says Lauro: "This is about as close as you can get to the way it sounded during slavery days." Lauro and McGlynn understand, too, that these clips must be experienced whole. They let the music unfold in real time, not snippets.

It’s a universal story that is also, by virtue of its very particular time and place, a singular experience.

It all works on the level of a sprightly sitcom: lesbianism for the Lucy-and-Ethel crowd.

Watching this movie, you get the feeling that the Depression existed so that Seabiscuit could be memorialized.

For most of the way this is an eye-popping, not blood-curdling, experience.

It's all a lot closer to melodrama than drama, but Thalbach is a dynamo.

Photographic Memory is about the permanence and impermanence of what we choose to preserve: on film and in our heads (which is often the same thing). I would like to think that one day Adrian might look at this documentary and see it as a supreme act of paternal love.

The new Superman has its visionary charms, but there's only so far you can go without great characters.

A breathtakingly beautiful achievement in every way.

Switching between the 1950s, the '60s, and the present, it's compelling in a middling miniseries kind of way – expansive but not terribly deep.

In "Birders," by contrast, nature is one big entrancing show; a world of tweets without "tweets."

Mamet is so in love with the con that he's conned himself.

The best family films are those that entertain both children and adults. The Sheep Detectives can be enjoyed simply as a funny fable with a solvable mystery at its center. The well-placed clues are hidden in plain view.

Dark Money should set off warning bells for even those who believe that the Citizens United decision, equating corporations with people and money with speech, was a First Amendment victory for free speech.

“Séraphine” was haunting; Violette, for all its writhings, is familiar.

The film is often​ sharp and amusing, but it’s a doodle in the Coen canon.

It’s to Hall’s credit that, in the end, we see Chubbuck as a victim of no one so much as herself.

Since 9/11-style terrorism is very much on display here, I suppose it’s fair to say that Star Trek Into Darkness is a sci-fi blow-out with overtones of the real. Series founder Gene Roddenberry would, I think, approve.

Suggests a cross between "Sunset Boulevard" and "All About Eve." The suggestion, alas, doesn't go very far, but Bening's performance approaches the pantheon.

This film has qualities of feeling and insight that set it apart from most movies about cantankerous coots. [18 Jun 1995, p.6]

This may be the first crime thriller to explicitly utilize superstring theory but, in its woozy romanticism, it's not that far removed from this year's other time-warp movie, "The Lake House," about two lovers living in parallel years - or "Frequency," which starred Jim Caviezel as a good guy.

A few of the performances, especially Nicole Kidman’s, as the lady in charge, and Kirsten Dunst’s, as the teacher pining to flee with the corporal, have some bite, but not enough to make much of an imprint in this brittle, vaporous chamber piece.

The film's predictability dampens its best parts. Having decided to make a movie about a dreaded subject, the filmmakers too often retreat into the comfort zone of easy assurances and flip quips.

If Abrams had stuck with the kids and cut way back on all the sci-fi hoo-ha, his film might have stood a fighting chance of being charming. Big is not always better, even when it comes to fantasies.

War Horse, despite its excellences, is a supreme demonstration of a director phoning it in.

The film, some of which looks staged, is too slick, and its feminist emphasis, complete with Australian performer Sia singing “You can do anything” on the soundtrack, grates. But Aisholpan triumphs over these excesses.

There is in The Mother a rich understanding of where old age takes you. Along with the myth that seniors don't have sex drives, the film dispels a larger one: that the years bring wisdom.

I've become weary of documentaries about winning prizes, but this one is special because the kids are.

It's a giddy nightmare. Nothing is quite what it seems in I Served the King of England, and this is poetically appropriate. The world it depicts is too dangerous and too lovely to classify.

Stunning, and it has the added bonus of being about an era that is virtually new to movies. As a dramatic achievement, however, it is not quite so amazing.

What saves it is Dennis Quaid.

The film is too artsy for its own good, but it has some marvelous Coen Brothers-style black humor.

Sorrentino’s magic is all smoke and mirrors. People calling this movie a visual feast must be awfully famished.

More good than bad, at least until its too tidy conclusion. Since it's essentially a three-character movie, it's a good thing that the characters, and the actors who play them, can hold the screen.

It may be subtitled, and the faces may be unfamiliar, but District B13 is the best buddy action movie around.

Lee has phenomenal presence, and his movements are so balletically powerful that his rampages seem like waking nightmares. Lee keeps you watching The Crow when you'd rather look away.

A slight but winning heart-tugger.

This is a startlingly funny portrait of Gothic Americana.

It's reminiscent of David Lynch, who is a master at mixing the ghastly and the risible. Brick would be better with a bit more Lynch in its soul, but Johnson is his own man, and I look forward to what he comes up with next.

Allow me a quick lament: Do we really want to see a great actor like Cumberbatch, not to mention Chiwetel Ejiofor and Tilda Swinton, entombed in yet another superhero franchise?

Lena Dunham, the writer-director-star of the microbudget Tiny Furniture, has a distinctive comedic take on the world – a kind of haggard spiritedness.

Director Alexandra Lipsitz doesn't do much more than chronicle the noise, but it's intermittently fun stuff.

Cash was a true anomaly: a poseur who was also the genuine article. A better movie would have made that contradiction its core.

What seems to start out as a burlesque against the rich -- a satire of class-consciousness -- ends up mutating into something stranger and richer and more ambiguous. [10 Dec 1993, p.F4]

From a psychological standpoint, this is murky territory but Jacobs presents it as the height of enlightenment – a confluence of two damaged souls. At least "Good Will Hunting," another movie that played this game, wasn't blah.

As an actress, Madonna has to work on her vulnerability more.

The most interesting plot development – Frankie starts falling for Sam – is nipped in the bud. Some things even a soap opera won't stoop to.

Rhys-Meyers and Johansson work well together - they both know how to project glossiness and guile.

It’s a strange movie – simultaneously rawly realistic and airbrushed.

The point of this film seems to be that wholesomeness is a sign of maturity, and it partially cancels out the performers. Juliet Stevenson breaks through anyway. She has a charged core, like Judy Davis, and she makes you root for her passage to happiness. [8 May 1991, p.6]

Inspires the requisite shock and awe, but a little goes a long way. About the fifth time I saw someone slip-sliding away from a 60-foot wave, I longed to hear someone on the soundtrack say, “That guy is really nuts.”

Carrell has stated in interviews that his accent "falls someplace between Bela Lugosi and Ricardo Montalban," and that's about right.

It's as if we were watching one of those buddy-buddy bromances told, this time, from the perspective of the woman who is normally on the sidelines of the men's attentions and affections. It's a welcome angle.

Jarecki's thesis is that law enforcement targets minority communities, but his analysis is far too simplistic. Since when did pushers become victims?

It takes a while to get into the ruminative rhythm of this film. But it’s worth it.

Capotondi keeps circling his movie in and out of dream states and waking states as the whodunit morphs into who-cares-who-dunit?

I haven't heard this much shouting in a movie since the first hour of "Full Metal Jacket."

I wish the directors had emphasized more of the players' personal lives apart from the football field. But, in the end, this is a documentary about Courtney and the transformative powers of caring. He works wonders on his players and they reciprocate.

Harry comes through loud and clear as a conflicted, edgy, avid young man. He's turned into EveryTeen.

Alarmist to an almost apocalyptic degree, the film is nevertheless packed with enough basic facts and figures to give any eater serious pause. Or at least any eater who indulges in sugar.

The movie has some powerful moments, but it's mostly superficial.

The film is better than the recent "The War Within," which tried for the same things, but ultimately, and perhaps unavoidably, we are left face to face with the unknowable.

The overfamiliarity of What Doesn't Kill You is redeemed by a full-scale performance from Mark Ruffalo.

Has an appealing rawness.

Sweetest, funniest, most humane movie I've seen all year.

The greater the illusion the greater the manipulator, and few are as good as Kevin Clash, the subject of Constance Marks's sprightly six-years-in-the-making documentary Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey.

Disney's Lilo & Stitch, which is animated in the traditional way, with watercolor backgrounds, is lovely, and funny, too. It owes a great deal to Japanese anime, but there's also a "Looney Tunes" friskiness to it that's distinctively homegrown.

There’s a ravishing aliveness to the spacious imagery; at least the clichés have room to roam free.

Pleasingly shaggy.

The filmmakers are smart enough – or cynical enough – to realize that we don't watch movies like Under the Same Moon in order to be surprised. We go to them for a good cry.

Snarky and enjoyable, but it could have been a ferocious black comedy. No Thank You For Playing It Safe.

Terrifying precisely because it doesn't go in for cheesy shock tactics and special effects. (Those sharks are REAL.)

Factotum is so sly and low-key hilarious that anybody can be in on the joke.

Intolerable Cruelty, while tolerable, isn't very radical--or very good, either. The Coens wrote the script eight years ago on assignment, not intending to direct it, and that may explain why the result often lacks their customary bizarro facetiousness.

Biting as it tries to be, Tropic Thunder is mostly toothless. Its targets – Hollywood vanity, Hollywood tantrums – are easy hits.

As fiercely unsentimental as Disgrace is, it offers by the end a measure of hope, and because that hope is so hard-won, it has the ring of truth.

As speculative storytelling goes, Mozart's Sister is ingenious but as moviemaking it's plodding.

Family home movies and photos and archival clips round out the film, which holds its hero-worshiping to fairly tolerable levels.

As Disney animated features go, Tangled is middling.

Cruise is better than he’s been in a while because he damps down his usual all-intensity-all-the-time MO. He’s best here when his character seems the most scared. And Emily Blunt as a commando legend is indomitable, a credit to her exoskeleton.

It’s the sort of poetic conceit that needs a filmmaker far more rapt and intuitive than Haynes, whose jeweler’s precision keeps everything at an emotional remove.

The war scenes in Hacksaw Ridge, which take up almost half the screen time, are almost on a level with the D-Day invasion sequence from “Saving Private Ryan.”

Nathalie Baye is remarkable in Le Petit Lieutenant where she plays Caroline Vaudieu, a Parisian police inspector who returns to her post after a bout with alcoholism following her child's death.

Although simpler and less mysterious than the great Hayao Miyazaki movies, the gently melancholic From Up on Poppy Hill is still a must see at a time when family entertainment is too often synonymous with blandness.

A moderately creepy, often garishly violent action horror film frontloaded with heretics, Christians, mercenaries, witches, witch-burners, and necromancers. There's something here for just about everyone.

The filmmakers may be just as clueless as Buddy when it comes to Mavis, who resembles nothing so much as a snooty stalker.

What this film is really about is how interconnected we all are, like it or not, on the Internet, and how alluring and alarming this can be.

Singles is a bright and beautiful piffle about love American-style, junior division.

If Penn really lets these actors sing, his watchful camera also knows how to respect their silences.

Showcases some of the world’s finest and funniest actors having a high old time. It’s best enjoyed as a kind of traveling music-hall revue.

I'm not sure I have it in me to rant yet again about what a deprivation it is for our finest actor to deny us his genius in this way.

Predictable, not so much from his (Zhang Yimou) previous movies as from the work of the many sentimentalists who have already plowed this well-tilled turf.

The coolness here has its creepiness, as in the dispassionate way Fincher depicts Lisbeth's rape and her subsequent, harrowing revenge, but the suspicion remains: Fincher didn't make this movie his own because he doesn't consider it his own.

The Booksellers is a documentary for people who treasure the sheer look and feel of books. It is for anyone who has ever spent way too much time in used and rare bookstores teetering on tall ladders or squeezing through narrow, tome-filled aisles in search of that most precious of commodities: the book you didn’t know you needed until you found it – or, to be more precise, it found you.

At a time when many of us look to comedy to keep us sane, the question is especially pertinent, although the answers here aren’t especially penetrating.

I don't wish to give offense here, but it certainly doesn't hurt that Mary Lou is voiced by that famously small bundle of energy Isla Fisher. (She's 5-foot-2.)

Marion Cotillard’s Lady Macbeth, however, is a triumph. She seems transfixed by her own capacity for evil, and her mad scene is one of the most unhistrionic, and therefore spookiest, ever filmed.

Warrior becomes increasingly shameless until, by the end, with the big fights fought, we are clearly meant to rise as one and applaud the indomitability of the human spirit. But the only indomitable thing about Warrior are its clichés.

There are some great, rapturous moments in Where the Wild Things Are. Jonze is humbled before the wonders of a child's imagination, and so are we.

Devotees of the "Whole Earth Catalogue" may regard this film as a nostalgia trip, but it's much more comprehensive, more forward-looking than that.

The film makes clear that the soft-spoken, diminutive Ginsburg fought early and hard for gender equality in the courts in her own steadfastly clearsighted way. She’s the opposite of a late bloomer.

Lelouch means to transcend the genre. He doesn't really move much beyond his usual glib panache here, but the plot is intriguing and so are the actors.

It's a marvelous, resonant joke that never quite succeeds: Stretches of the film resemble a Dario Argento horrorfest crossed with a Mel Brooks spoof. But the director, E. Elias Merhige, and his screenwriter, Steven Katz, occasionally bring some rapture to the creepiness, and Dafoe's vampire, with his graceful, ritualistic death lunges, is a sinewy, skull-and-crossbones horror who seems to come less out of the German Expressionist tradition than from Kabuki.

Most of the time we are with Cruise and Foxx, and their interplay is never less than galvanizing.

It appears to have been made from the inside, not only of the characters but of the historical situation in which they struggle.

What Happens in Vegas is not only annoying, it's also incompetent – a bad mix.

Elba is one of those actors who radiates his own force field even if he’s sitting still, or just tying his shoe. His no-nonsense performance helps to eradicate some of Sorkin’s nonsense.

In some ways the movie's straightforward style is more appropriate to the horror than a more souped-up approach would have been. With material this strong, sometimes the best thing a filmmaker can do is to stay out of the way.

On a purely visceral level, Training Day is easily the most exciting movie out there right now, but as a morality tale with anything large on its mind, it's a cop-out.

Berlinger is after more than a true crime recounting here – the film attempts to explain, often lucidly, sometimes laboriously, how deeply entrenched Bulger was with the FBI and the police.

Although I Am Big Bird is no great shakes as a piece of filmmaking, and skews into treacly inspirational terrain, it’s still worth seeing to make the acquaintance of a man who, although he would probably be the last to say so, is an artist of the first rank. And a nice guy, too. What a rare combo.

The footage of Gehry's work, notably the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, is often startlingly beautiful, and Gehry is forthcoming about how he achieved his effects. But too much of the film is taken up with gushy self-serving talking-head testimonials.

Linklater must have recognized a kindred spirit when he read Belber's play. He's given us a reality-fantasy game, a psychodrama, a harangue, and a detective story all rolled into one.

For all the film’s righteous anger and obeisance to Baldwin, it remains a baffling, amorphous construct.

The action is nonstop and often harrowing and well staged. But van Houten, while a charmer, doesn't adequately convey the disgust (and connivance) that her character would inevitably feel in such a situation.

As a piece of drama, What Happened Was . . . isn't any great shakes; it's essentially an actors' workshop exercise that exists primarily as a showcase for its cast. And because Noonan and, especially, Sillas are so good, it triumphs. [06 Oct 1994, p.F10]

Florence Foster Jenkins isn’t really about how passion trumps art. It’s about how life is more important than art.

Sokurov is a playful philosopher. If his playfulness is sometimes juvenile – as in those Napoleon scenes, or, worse, in the scenes of an actress playing Marianne, the spirit of France, exhorting, “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood” – at least he’s not stuffy.

Highly uneven, but at least it doesn’t glamorize Hawking’s life or turn it into a paean to endurance.

What have the Yes Men actually accomplished with their japery? Their film is an inadvertent reminder that activist antics are not the same thing as reform.

There is no law requiring a biopic to make “nice” with its subject, but Get On Up, which presents Brown almost entirely unflatteringly except as a performer, makes you wonder why the filmmakers (including Mick Jagger, one of its producers) took the trouble.

Marvelously enjoyable.

The film’s most joyous performer is the bagpiper Cristina Pato, known as “the Jimi Hendrix of Galicia,” who is such a powerhouse that she could probably upstage the Rolling Stones (in their prime).

For all its pretensions and intermittent power, is essentially high-grade claptrap.

The conceit of the movie is that everyone is obsessed by something and never really tunes into anybody else.

Practitioners of Cajun, Creole, and zydeco music strut their stuff. So do the players of a style new to me but instantly beloved: I'm speaking of swamp pop.

Jeunet wants us to know that times are hard for dreamers and that one shouldn't pass up a chance for true love. He means it, no doubt, but he doesn't have the simplicity of soul to quite bring off the sentiment. Still, we're charmed by the attempt.

Boyle loads his movie with so many snazzy effects that we lose sight of what it all means – if anything. His showoffiness confuses.

At this late date there is little that is factually revelatory about his film, but as a human document of what people are capable of in wartime, it's indispensable.

Rudd is amusing enough; Segel, who towers over Rudd, is amusing, too, though the role seems to have been written for Owen Wilson. Maybe Wilson was busy. Lucky him.